‘Ab-ex’ exhibit offers juxtaposition of East, West

When it comes to experiencing paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, face time still counts: You can’t grasp their size, scale and textures in a book or on a digital screen, nor the subtle changes in light, tone and perspective as you scroll, rather than stroll, to take them in.

Stand in the gorgeous presence of one of Willem De Kooning’s big canvasses and you can feel its pulsing energy charging the air.

Still, while in-person encounters with the great works of the western canon are exciting, it’s what you expect from a museum.

Something beyond the expected — something that feels both familiar and new — is to see a De Kooning, his “Woman as Landscape” (1954 or ’55), say, presented alongside “Phoenix” (1972), another large abstract work in a warm palette by a lesser-known artist.

Far from being eclipsed by its famous neighbor, this brilliant painting by Keichi Kimura, an American painter from Waianae, arrests the viewer with its glow.

Such enlightening juxtapositions abound in “Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West,” a blockbuster exhibit that opens Thursday at the Honolulu Museum of Art.

“We affectionately refer to it as ‘Ab-ex,’” said Theresa Papanikolas, the museum’s curator of European and American art, who organized the show together with her colleague Stephen Salel, curator of Japanese art.

Papanikolas and Salel have brought together more than 45 paintings, drawings and sculptures from Asian galleries and mainland museums such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

The University of Iowa museum, previously led by Sean O’Harrow, now the Honolulu museum’s director, has lent a stunning crimson painting by Mark Rothko to the exhibit.

It’s also a rare chance to see works, like De Kooning’s “Woman,” that have been borrowed from private collections.

The purpose of “Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West” is to fill a gap in art history by illuminating the significant but little-appreciated role played by Asian artists, including several from Hawaii, in the development of the splashy, spontaneous art style that exploded on the scene in the 1940s and is predominantly associated with the big-name, white, male painters of the New York School.

In revealing this hidden history, the show “takes a fresh look at Abstract Expressionism, the first native movement of American Modernism,” Papanikolas said.

On the Western side, the exhibit includes major works by heavy hitters Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt and Robert Motherwell.

The Eastern contingent includes Hawaii-born Isami Doi, Saturo Abe, Tadashi Sato, George Miyasaki, Tetsuo Ochikubo, Reuben Tam, Bumpei Akaji, and Kimura and his wife, Sueko Kimura; West Coast natives Paul Horiuchi, Ruth Asawa and Isamu Noguchi (known locally for his “Sky Gate” sculpture near Honolulu Hale); and Japan-born Kenzo Okada and Saburo Hasegawa.

No matter their ethnicity, the Abstract Expressionists were fluid, searching and overlapping in their social lives as in their artwork. White, Asian and African-American artists moved in the same circles in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles and other places where the movement flourished.

“These Asian artists, many of whom are overlooked in what we art historians call the canon — those who go down in history as important painters and sculptors of note — were moving in the same circles, having contact with, borrowing from the same sources as the white artists and working in the same places and time, in the same style,” Papanikolas said.

In New York, from 1950 to 1960, Abstract Expressionists such as De Kooning, Pollock, Klein, Reinhardt and Guston gathered to hear lectures and presentations on Friday nights at The Club on 8th Street. In 1954, as part of a series on Asian art and Zen Buddhism, Hasegawa gave a talk about the influence of American abstract art on Japanese art.

Also in 1954, a group of local Asian-American artists, including Sato, Abe, Ochikubo, Akaji, Jerry Okimoto and Edmund Chung, many of whom had studied and worked on the mainland and abroad, put on a group show at an old house that was slated for demolition on Metcalf Street in Honolulu.

Calling themselves the Metcalf Chateau Group, the Hawaii Modernists were expressing an esprit de corps with the “Irascibles” — a group of 18 New York painters including Still, Newman, Reinhardt and Pollock, who in 1950 had written a letter of protest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art about its selection process for an exhibition of modern American painting that had overlooked them. The letter caused a stir, and along with the publication of a large photo of the Irascibles in Life magazine, put the New York School painters on the map.

In a similar outcome, after the Metcalf Chateau show, the then-director of the then-Honolulu Academy of Arts reached out to the group and offered it an exhibition.

“Ab-Ex” feels like a party of the beautiful and famous: Canvasses and sculptures seem to be conversing and reacting to one another, dressed in similar yet strikingly individual styles.

The exhibit opens with the fiery, orange-on-black calligraphy of Morita Shiryu’s “Dragon Knows Dragon” (1954) and Philip Guston’s multicolored “Ceremony” (1957), which, on a yellow ground, seems to cross-reference with Isami Doi’s “My Mystic Pilgrimage,” in which two encrusted torso shapes float in marigold air.

Outstanding throughout are works of calligraphic quality, brushed in expressive, rhythmic lines by Still, Pollock, Motherwell, Kline, Miyasaki and Hasegawa.

Hasegawa was raised in the artistic tradition of calligraphy and corresponded from the early 1950s with Kline; Hasegawa sent Kline copies of his Asian art magazine, which Kline went on to share with other New York artists. Meanwhile, another famous westerner, Ad Reinhart, was a lifelong student of Asian art.

How was it, then, that Asian painters including Hawaii’s native abstractionists were left out of the canon?

While there’s no set answer, it didn’t help that Asian art was excised from Abstract Expressionism in a revisionist essay by New York critic Clement Greenberg, perhaps the most influential art critic of the 20th century.

Greenberg rejected the idea of “a general Oriental influence on ‘abstract expressionism.’” Of the painters he championed, such as Pollock, he writes, “The sources of their art lie entirely in the West.” He pointedly dismisses any similarities between Kline’s work and Chinese or Japanese calligraphy.

Later, sadly, even Kline came to deny the Asian connection, Papanikolas said, “for the sake of his career.”

Noting that Greenberg also rejected Europe as an influence, Papanikolas explained the critic’s motive. “He had this very vested interest in promoting a group as the American native school of artists, and an American art as the most significant thing in the art world.”

Greenberg was also biased against sculpture, Papanikolas said. Happily, the show’s inclusion of Abe’s majestic sculptures evoking antlers and thorn palings in bronze, a cluster of large ceramic vessels by Toshiko Takaesu and Asawa’s spiritlike, hanging wire forms demonstrate that abstract expression was alive and well in 3-D.

This exhibit is part of a recent trend of shows and studies reviving interest in art by underrepresented groups, including African-­Americans and women, as Papanikolas notes.

While Rothko’s brooding, color-field elegance and De Kooning’s fleshy, wild abstract woman are among the many joys to behold in “Abstract Expressionism,” Kimura’s “Phoenix” and the phalanx of calligraphic works by Westerners and Easterners alike steal the show, along with a few abstracted landscapes from Hawaii artists Miyasaki, Sueko Kimura and Tam.

Tam’s green mountains, on their own, span East and Far West, evoking both his native Kauai and an island in Maine that he loved.